When my brother was swimming and playing water polo he took four sandwiches to school, plus three or four pieces of fruit and three fudge brownies. The only guy I know who took a grocery bag to school instead of a lunch bag.

And he still had less than 7% body fat. Swimming burns a lot of calories if you're aggressive.

I have gone to referee college at the USOC training center in Chula Vista CA...awesome food service! And yes the athletes train hard and have to eat a lot of calories. We were lunching one day, and a tour group of kids came through. They asked us, wide-eyed, are you Olympic athletes? I answered no, we just eat like 'em!

Massive engine requires massive fuel. So what? Are the leftards going to belly-ache that this man's meal is anti-environment? After all, look at how many chocolate chips had to be killed for him to be an Olympian. Like, oh. my. gawd.

I teach group exercise classes part-time, in addition to my full time job. Two of my certifications were 3 day courses, 9 hours each day. I wore my heart rate monitor during the last one, which was primarily cardio based (it's called Bodycombat). According to that monitor I burned 4000-4400 calories per day. I ate almost as much as I could tolerate the entire weekend; and I still lost 4 1/2 lbs.

"I have my doubts about this; it reminds of Tony Mandrich(sp)of the Packers on the SI cover saying he ate 35,000 calories per day to keep bulked up.

Turns out he was steroids."

Steroids alone won't bulk you up, you do need the food. It's just that steroids give the process an artificial boost in converting those calories into something more than just flab, and accelerates muscle recovery.

The larger, bulkier, football players in normal, non-steroid using mode, tend to lose lots of weight over the course of a season, and need to consume a lot of calories. When these athletes retire, if they don't adjust their diet enough for a less active lifestyle, they balloon up.